NRB’s Policy is Not Only The Reason Behind PayPal Not Coming to Nepal

There are various Nepali IT companies and Nepali Startups, who have a great potential to showcase their product globally but the major pitfall is not having Legal Online Payment Mechanism in Nepal. Being a Tech Passionate and Contributor, I guess, am not the only one who goes to Google.com and type “Why is PayPal not available in Nepal? and continuously digging around each article to know about withdraw hack.

After Googling sometimes, you end up, convincing your friends and families, who lives in abroad, to help you to setup a PayPal account in which you receive money from your clients and then your friends and families’ in turn withdraw that money into their bank account and then send the money to Nepal via Western Union or any other remittance companies.

In other words, you end up with “ 1. Money Laundering”. But, remember this is not the legal way to receive the money via any remittance and there is a problem that your relatives has to face.

First problem with this method is that the person who is receiving money abroad has to pay all the taxes on the money they receive in their bank and have to show the source of the money if it exceeds beyond certain point and secondly you are essentially being a Money transfer agent between two separate entities without any legal license to do so. The sooner you stop this setup , the better it’s for everyone involved in this.

So, you may think about next solution to the PayPal problem; “2. Bank Wire Transfer”, which is the 100% legal method of transaction between two business entities but if you are a small time freelancer in Nepal or are just starting up it is hard to ask your client to SWIFT you the money. Bank charges anywhere from $15 and above for every transaction and if all you are receiving is $100 from your work then it kind of becomes hard to justify $15 on each wire transfer.

Hence, for small scale freelancer, Bank Wire Transfer doesn’t work as thought and thinking about client side, bank process is tedious.

According to Mr. Mohammad Tajim, CEO & Founder at SingleRange.com, 50% of people who see an option of selling their services through internet quit doing so when they cannot figure out how to get paid. I have personally seen talented designer and developer quitting online freelancing altogether because they cannot figure out how to get paid at the end of the day. Other 50% who are persistent enough find a hack through system and use that until that hack is closed and once its closed they start looking for another hack.

Till now, we talk about PayPal scenario and its alternatives. Let’s discuss about problem. Here problem is with freelancers and outsourcing companies in Nepal as well.

Zero Data:
As we know data helps to solve specific problem. Government of Nepal (GON), doesn’t have a sufficient data of outsourcing companies, which is the main reason behind PayPal not investing in Nepal. When a company like PayPal wants to come into Nepal they ask the government for data and when the Government itself has no idea how many people in their country are working online then how can it prove PayPal that Nepal is right fit for their business. At the end, PayPal is a business and they need solid data before they invest in a country and at a time when they are not able to fully open up their services in India, Nepal is not even in their horizon at the moment.

Not Paying Taxes:
Let’s assume that, 3 out of 10 IT companies are paying the taxes and GON think that there are only 3 IT companies who are paying the taxes or are under tax bracket and other remaining companies are outside of Government’s radar, which is why our government does not see IT industry as huge change maker.

The only solution of global online transaction is to wait till our local payment gateway like; esewa, ipay and others get tie up with international payment gateway. There was ounce of hope when esewa tie up with Skrill (one of the online global payment gateway), many Nepalese IT Professionals’ hoped that the online transaction will be a piece of cake. Let me tell you the inside story of skrill and esewa, you can easily receive the money from your skrill account to esewa but can’t send or load the money to Skrill, which is not so useful as we thought. Not having the global payment gateway feels like we are not progressing as the global ventures are. It’s not that we don’t have a global competitive products. To name few: Grepsr, Picovico, Karkhana and others.

A tech-savvy, foodie, traveler and bookholics, who loves to write about android apps and startup. Rupak is an avid learner of technology and entrepreneurship. When not blogging, he is most probably watching movies.
Drop in a note at rupak@blogortech.com

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